Pseudowires

A pseudowire (PW) is a virtual circuit (VC) formed between two provider edge (PE) devices that connects peering Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS) PE nodes.

An Ethernet pseudowire is logically viewed as an L2 nexthop (VC label) that is reachable through an L3 nexthop (LDP label).

The frames from an AC endpoint packet are sent through an ingress pseudowire interface (which abstracts the transport path and packet encapsulations) towards the remote PE. An egress pseudowire interface then abstracts the packet received from a remote PE and hands it over to the corresponding AC end-point.

A pseudowire interface is unidirectional.

PWs support the following underlying MPLS tunnels:

PWs do not support the following underlying MPLS tunnels: